Amal Clooney Says the #MeToo Movement Has Made the Future Safer for Her Daughter

Vogue's May cover star is none other than Amal Clooney, international human rights lawyer, incoming Met Gala co-chair, and longtime defender of women. Sitting down with Vogue in the gorgeous Aberlash House she shares with her two children and her husband, George, she discussed a wide range of topics — from her most high-profile legal case defending Yazidis to the systemic mistreatment of women everywhere to her marriage and family. At one point, the conversation turned to the #MeToo movement, and Clooney commended the survivor-activists for bettering the future for her baby daughter, Ella, who turns one in June.

“I think because of the brave women who have come forward to tell their stories, the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation,” Clooney told Vogue. “We’re in a situation where a predator feels less safe and a professional woman feels more safe, and that’s where we need to be.”

The #MeToo movement in the United States has widely centered around sexual assault and harassment in the workplace (most visibly, white collar workplaces and the entertainment industry). However, Clooney’s own work, most recently, includes defending Yazidi refugee women who have been sexually assaulted and abused by ISIS. In the Vogue interview, she introduced the magazine to her client Nadia Murad, the 25-year-old Yazidi refugee turned Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who just published her memoir.

“Not many people stepped up to help as she did,” Murad says of Clooney in the Vogue piece through a translator. “I was surprised that someone like her — a successful lawyer with a strong record — would help us. We’re a very small community.”

Knowing Clooney’s history of work on the mistreatment of women, however, it may not be so surprising, after all. In addition to Murad’s case, Vogue reported that in 2015 she represented Khadija Ismayilova, the Azerbaijani investigative journalist who was imprisoned on what Clooney argued were fabricated charges after she published a story about Azerbaijan’s corrupt president. One of Clooney’s earliest assignments was petitioning the European Court of Human Rights for Yulia Tymoshenko, the Orange Revolution leader and former Ukrainian prime minister, who, according to Vogue, “alleged a politically motivated legal case against her by the Ukrainian government.” “As women we may not be a minority, but there is a bond that we all share,” Clooney said in a speech from a year and a half ago, according to Vogue. “It is not a bond of geography. Or religion. Or culture. It is a bond of shared experience — experiences that only women go through, and struggles that only women face.”